"Those who don't know history are destined to repeat it."
Edmund Burke. What happened on this Day in History?

Wednesday, August 1, 2012

This Day in History: Aug 1, 1774: Joseph Priestley discovers oxygen

On this day in 1774, dissenting British minister Joseph Priestly, author of Observations on Civil Liberty and the Nature and Justice of the War with America,
discovers oxygen while serving as a tutor to the sons of American
sympathizer William Petty, 2nd Earl of Shelburne, at Bowood House in
Wiltshire, England.

Joseph Priestley shared the liberal religious and political philosophy of many of America’s revolutionary leaders, including Benjamin Franklin, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson,
all of whom became his friends and correspondents. Priestley first met
Franklin while both were living in London during the 1760s. Both were
Renaissance men with established reputations as scientists and political
philosophers and they embarked on an enduring friendship. In 1774,
Franklin and Priestley attended the first Unitarian sermon given at the
first Unitarian church founded in London. Unitarianism evolved out of a
dissenting Christian tradition that denied the concept of the Trinity
and the divinity of Christ. Unitarians instead believed that God was one
being and that Christ was a human spokesman of God’s truth. Priestley
had been born into a dissenting (non-Anglican Protestant) family and
gradually found his way to Unitarianism by the early 1760s. Franklin’s
views were very similar and sympathetic to Unitarians, but he never
joined a Unitarian congregation.

Although still living in England, Priestley endorsed both the
American and French revolutions, authoring pamphlets in support of each.
On the second anniversary of Bastille Day, a mob in Birmingham,
England, burned Priestley’s home, including his first-class scientific
laboratory and the Unitarian church where he preached. As a result of
the attack, he decided that he could no longer live in England and
immigrated to the United States in 1794.

Priestley settled in Northumberland, Pennsylvania,
where he lived until his death in 1804. While there, Priestley
established the first Unitarian church in Philadelphia, where then-Vice
President John Adams attended his sermons.